Careers Guide 2013: I, scientist

DIGITAL tools have changed the way we live. Five years on from the release of the first iPhone, people can now explore foreign cities, track their portfolio performance and graph their sleep cycle - all within their coffee break. Smartphone apps, coupled with new trends in social media, have become enmeshed in the daily lives of the stylish, the affluent and the slightly geeky.

But what about scientists? Somewhat bafflingly, much of what goes on in the lab still relies on the same pen-and-paper methods that have served science well this past millennium. So how is digital technology affecting life in the lab? And will the tools that have already made inroads phase out science's analogue darlings, or will they be dropped once the novelty wears off?

In the early days of the smartphone, apps were mainly minimalist platform games or an easy way to find a good Thai restaurant. But their fun-loving childhood was short-lived and they are now more synonymous with utility than shakable light-sabres. This has made them an essential part of daily life for many. One particularly useful group for scientists is archiving apps like Evernote. Effectively allowing you to archive all the notes you have ever taken on a subject, be it a voice memo or a scribble on a napkin, Evernote and its ilk appeal to the budding lifeloggers among us - and those who need to organise vast amounts of information.

Another popular app is Epicollect. Created by Sarah Butcher and her team at Imperial College London, this data-collection cousin to note-taking apps takes information recorded by a smartphone, logs each data point's location, and then sends it to a central server. The app can be applied to virtually any type of project - from logging disease transmission in western Africa to mapping your summer road trip.

"People have a very clear idea of how they generate data, but they don't necessarily have the means to analyse it or to share it in a way that makes it usable," says Butcher. This becomes more of a problem as people want to integrate larger data sets, she says. "You might have 10 postdocs all working on the same project, generating and modelling data of different types. They need to be able to visualise the same stuff at the same time." Epicollect can solve this problem.

Despite the popularity of apps such as these, and the relatively straightforward development process to make and distribute them, science apps are not available in anything like the same number as finance or business apps. Why is this?

"No one ever really thinks software can do the tasks of pen-and-paper processes in lab science," says Chris Seaton. He co-created the app Mersey Burns while doing a PhD in computer science at the University of Manchester, UK. Having been a captain in the Royal Army Medical Corps, Seaton knew that when people receive serious burns, medics need to get the right amount of fluid into them very quickly. Mersey Burns calculates the precise quantity of fluids needed, saving time and avoiding mistakes.

But long-standing medical practices are hard to phase out, even when they are flawed. Not to mention that whipping out a smartphone in the ER may rub some doctors, and patients, up the wrong way. But Seaton thinks digital tools need to become an extension of our professional minds, even in high-stress situations. "They just need to crack on and get the fluids in. The idea is that the app can be in their back pocket and it's free so they have it when they need it."

Not all scientists are against the march of smartphones. For Enea Milioris, a second year PhD student at the Institute for Child Health at University College London, note-taking apps have revolutionised the way he organises his work. Of these, he prefers Evernote, he says. "I drop in protocols, data, sample lists, scanned gels, meeting notes, presentations, admin paperwork. Everything." The other apps in his digital tool-belt reflect the variety of his work. "On the bench, I use DailyCalcs, Protocols and Cloning Bench as well as the Promega app. They are all handy quick references and I find the visualisation of protocols helps me shift focus."

Currently, Milioris is an outlier in his embrace of all things digital, being one of just a few in his department that has caught the app bug. That's understandable, he says, as things can get pretty messy in the lab. "Not everyone wants their phone or tablet in the way of salmonella, and in departments like mine you can't put your work in the cloud as it's private data, often from patients." Nevertheless, Milioris relishes not having to look through yellowing notebooks every time he needs to look something up.

Social media's presence in traditional science can also be a touchy subject. In most fields, Twitter, Facebook and blogging platforms like Wordpress and Tumblr have become accepted as effective ways of broadening your profile, bringing with them a vast range of potential faux pas and new etiquette (retweeting compliments is a no-no; the casual publishing of panda videos less so).

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